When Digital Vigilantes Attack!

Hi folks -- I was watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Monday night (yes, I'm the guy; yes, I know it's pretty much toast), when I saw a promo for the local NBC affiliate's 11PM news.

It promised to be a breathless story on how digital vigilantes could ruin your life... assuming you were a bad driver, bad parker, or bad dresser.

Gee, how did I possibly know we were in the middle of February Sweeps?

Anyway, the promo worked -- I stuck around for the story, which you can read or watch online:

Photo of NBC4's Doreen Gentzler doing the intro for Digital Vigilantes.

The report was by Miguel Almaguer, and it was all about how regular folks, using the power of the blogs and the IntarWebs, could make uncorroborated, unsubstantiated accusations of your bad behavior and smear your good name, without you ever knowing or being able to respond.

For example, take driving: Say I'm driving to work, and someone yakking on their cell phone  makes an illegal U-turn in front of me and almost hits me.

Now, I will probably never flip them off or go all road-rage on them (because I might end up in a meeting with them some day, among other concerns), but I might post on about them and their license plate on Platewire.com (which, in a local note, is run by Mark Buckman of Vienna, Virginia, probably a dozen miles down the road).

Other sites mentioned in the story include BadDriving.com (a UK-focused site), and IParkLikeanIdiot.com (which is pretty much a storefront for bumperstickers that you're supposed to buy and not do anything with, especially not put on badly-parked cars).

Another site from the news recently (but not in the story) is Hollaback NYC [content warning], which is for women reporting street harassment.

Then there's pretty much all of YouTube and every other video, photo and blog site out there.

Now, I'm of two minds on this. The first is: Look, you're in public, where you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and as Mr. Buckman notes, your license plate number is part of the public record. So it's legal, unless you start moving into libel, slander, defamation or stalking territory, which are already covered under existing laws.

On the flip side, it does have a very Maoist-denunciation, surveillance society, invisible informer kind of flavor to it. And that's not even taking into account the potential abuse from unwarranted or flat-out false accusations.

However, ultimately I think it's a pretty big fuss that will shake itself out. As I said, existing laws should cover most abuses, and even anonymous Web submitters can be revealed with technical know-how and the proper court orders.

Also, I think it's not as ominious as it might be if a government or other large entity were to do this. The playing field is pretty level --  individuals are on equal footing to report each other's behavior. And just as the internet makes it easy for people to spread this kind of information, so is it easier for people to find out what's being said about them (whisper campaigns are not new to the Internet).

Not to say that one of these snitch sites might not someday get sued out of existence. I just think it was portrayed as pretty sensationalist stuff for sweeps week.

What do you think of these digital denunciations? Would you ever report a bad driver or post a picture of a bad parking job on the Web? What would you do if someone did it to you (and you deserved it, or you didn't)? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Now you'll excuse me as I go look up my license plate...

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: platewire, sweeps, road rage, digital vigilantes, social media